In my last post I shared how presentation platforms/communities contribute to my professional learning, sharing, and growth.

Search the Scoop.it community

Also in my arsenal are tools that, in the old days, we would have called current awareness services.

These curation tools allow you to follow others who share your interests and to push newsfeeds to your inbox after setting up a variety of search/interest parameters.

Some push automatically; some allow you to hand-pick and annotate specific items from those feeds. Most also allow you to curate discoveries made on the fly through the use of a handy browser bookmarklet to facilitate clipping, scooping, pinning, bookmarking, etc. when you are not actually on the platform.

These curated newspaper/magazine communities allow members to follow other members to facilitate discovery.  Again, it’s all about the network.  Your discoveries will be as powerful and the people and organizations you chose to search and follow.

While there are a number of choices in this current awareness curation genre, my personal favorite is Scoop.it.

I’ll confess, I take far more than I give on this platform, but I try to contribute regularly in the form of the five subject areas my free subscription allows.

I currently curate newsletters on: School Libraries/Teacher Libraries; Information Fluency/Transliteracy; Curation, Libraries and Learning; Search Tools; and Virtual Library School.

Whenever I have the time–often over breakfast and also when I am desperately scrambling for a new idea–I check my email alerts and I scan the incoming feeds and decide which of the 100 suggestions I want to rescoop.  When I have a specific need, I search the community beyond my established keywords.

I have come to value the discoveries and the curatorial voices of so many people I follow on Scoop.it, so many of whom I would not have met in other networks.  I see who has rescooped my scoops and extend my network through them as well.